


Little Stone

by aptasi



Category: Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan
Genre: Depersonalization, Gen, Present Tense, Trauma, body unease, disorientation, post-Sindhol, trauma response
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-17 03:34:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28842447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aptasi/pseuds/aptasi
Summary: After Sindhol, Moiraine waits by the water and starts to get used to her body
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	Little Stone

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is loosely inspired by Nancy Hightower's poem "Ritual" from the collection The Acolyte.
> 
> Rating is for trauma and a variety of trauma responses.

That first early morning, while the men scout, they leave her by the riverbank, tucked behind a boulder by a bend, so she can choose to make herself known or hide. 

Moiraine watches the yellow-white light on the gurgling water, flickering in random brightnesses, and thinks to herself that she understands why men worship illumination, as her atrophied eyes wake. 

She hefts a stone, holding it with her toes, handing it up to her fingers, experimenting with grip, dropping and retrieving it. 

So grey that it is nearly blue, the little piece of riverbed reminds Moiraine of her kesiera, a stone that knows all her secrets and its fill of the secrets of others. Or once did, when her secrets had been limited to the real.

With the men gone, the newly rescued flesh has permission to touch her surroundings and map the limitations of her own body, like a small child playing in the shallows. 

Moiraine learns to fidget. If there was a childhood before decorum, where she had been young enough to be allowed to worry at something as she does this stone now, she has no memories of it real or false. 

This stone is real. Moiraine can move it; she can roll it around in her hand, push it against herself where it juts sharp and watch the skin divot. She has agency over it, and it will not constantly randomize with no heed to cause or effect beyond a mandate to make her feel anything and everything. 

This one is no gemstone, refined and made perfect by pressure and fire. This is what happens when the composite ingredients try to retain their identity, a result that is sedimentary, flaky. 

See, she can break it apart like pastry, flick it asunder with her fingernails, those nails that kept growing in that place while the rest of her body stilled like Siuan, like near enough her. She bit them short, first chance, so Thom would not see them.

The men return quickly. The back of her mind realizes they hurried. This vacant exploratory play may not be permitted to last. Thom pulls her to standing so she can put on the dress. The dress that he brings to her is blue. 

Light, she has returned a typecast, with symbolism draped off her foreign shoulders. 

Moiraine is aware that she should throw the stone back into the river and the memories with it 

Killers, not victims, keep trophies and the stories are full of honorable women who never spoke of what never happened. Even if Moiraine might hold the record for just how never the happening truly was, she has things to accomplish.

But she abducts the stone into her pocket, as Thom picks her up and she rests against his chest, hiding her face in the smell of him.

She has had her fill of never speaking again, for every one of her lifetimes.


End file.
